One of the first things we decided to do was to change the lighting in the house. Only a couple of fixtures changed, but mostly we were concerned with the actual light bulbs, and for one major reason – MONEY. It’s expensive to use incandescent bulbs throughout a house! Along with all the room we’ve acquired comes a lot of lighting needs, and in counting JUST the existing bulbs (not counting lamps, floodlights or florescent tubes, mind you!) we had a total of 45 bulbs!
Did you know that most of the energy used for a regular light bulb goes toward HEAT? That heat doesn’t make the light any brighter in the room, but it does cause the temperature in the room to rise, making your air conditioning system work harder.
Our home isn’t like the Trace Adkins song, “Every Light in the House is On”, because we have plenty of natural daylight coming through our many windows. That said, we also have a daughter & son-in-law who live in the basement, where there is not as much natural light In the rest of the house, when the sun goes down, the lights come on. So let’s say we have lights on in the kitchen as I’m preparing dinner, plus the dining room where someone is setting the table. Then son-in-law reading in another room and hubby is in the garage working on a project. If lighting in the home was provided by traditional incandescent bulbs, the heat generated would make our air conditioner have to work harder to cool down the areas being used.
Since we are using CFLs, two things are happening. 1: the heat generated by all the CFL bulbs is significantly less and 2: the energy expenditure is equivalent to only a couple of regular bulbs, which would not be sufficient to provide our lighting needs. The A/C doesn’t have to work as hard and we’re saving money two ways.
Want to see what your savings would be if you switched from traditional bulbs to CFLs? Click Here: 
And while we’re on the subject of lighting, I want to say that I really don’t care how the bulbs look! The twisty, curly design suits me fine! If that’s not the case for you, know that there are alternatives to the curly bulbs. They may cost a little more, but if aesthetics mean that much to you, it’s money well spent.
****In the beginning, I had many blogs for the sake of keeping business activity, green observations, & personal things separate. Now I am just combining everything back to this blog. I’ll be copying older entries, such as this one, to complement current posts.